Richard Fateman asks if a hardware accelerator speeds up Mathematica
very much. He points out that it does thousands of instructions for
every floating point instruction. This observation is correct.
However, there are built-in functions that Mathematica does
differently. For example if you invert a matrix of all machine
floats, Mathematica copies the numbers into a separate area, then
calls the Linpack routine DGEDI. For this, an acclerator will help a
lot.
-- David Jacobson